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From hammer to smartphone – How are we affected by our digital things?

A new research project has been launched at UID, aimed at
investingating how digital things are designed and connected - and
what they do to us.

How many everyday things around us are digital? The obvious
example is the smart phone and the apps on it that we use to work,
play, communicate, create, shop and manage our finances. But
digital things also now include cars, watches, speakers, climate
control systems and so much more. Since we can't exactly 'look
under the hood' anymore, how do we know what these things are
actually doing? And why do they seem to know so much about us
anyway? A recent Wallenberg Foundation grant of 4,5M SEK has been
awarded to Umeå Institute of Design's Heather Wiltse and Johan
Redström to try to answer some of these questions.

"As more 'traditional' objects become digital, we see that
digital things such as smartphone or computer applications are
indeed also quite thing-like, showing up for us as things we use to
get stuff done. So, what is actually going on with things in this
new digital landscape of data-driven, interconnected products and
systems? What do these changes mean for how we design and use the
things around us? In this project we hope to develop concepts that
allow us to discuss and understand these things, in order to help
designers, researchers, and ordinary users better understand and
care for their consequences and guide toward positive change", says
Heather Wiltse, Assistant Professor at Umeå Institute of
Design.

What is the difference between a hammer and an app on your
smartphone? Just about everything. What they do have in common is
that both are designed things. However, the hammer stays the same
while the app on your phone might collect data, change and adapt
based on your interactions with it. The way we engage with an app,
whether monitoring our health or getting updates on our favourite
bands' tour dates, produces valuable data that is sold to
advertisers. In the case of Facebook and other social media
platforms, more elaborate patterns of data collection steer
interactions among users, perhaps even altering behaviour on a more
significant scale.

The enormous amounts of personal data that are generated help
create personalized and refined solutions that can be delightful.
But in a world in which data is the new oil - the basic resource
and lifeblood of socioeconomic processes - these things that get to
know us so well are also producing data about us that flow to other
"hidden" actors. This kind of data can then also be used for
profiling, targeting, monitoring, and even surveillance and
control.

So, things have changed, and are continually changing as the new
norm. But our ways of thinking about them in use and design have
not kept up. Heather Wiltse and Johan Redström believe that
responsibly designing these connected things and systems requires
better understanding of their increasing complexity - what they
are, what they do, and whom they really serve.

"Digital things today have connections and do things that you
can't even see. There are worries here of course, about growing
data trails and surveillance and so on. But I believe it's
important to not just be pessimistic about it. We need to be
critical, but we also need to learn to talk about what these things
actually are and all of the things they are doing in a more nuanced
way. To be able to make these things more transparent, we first
need to understand what transparency could even look like in such
complex computational processes", says Heather Wiltse.